Don’t let liberal outrage determine what you can and cannot say.

In Town Hall, John Hawkins takes note of a number of recent news stories of people on the Left finding things to be offended about. Then, he concludes,

These stories, all of which have happened recently, are just a drop in the bucket. Liberals are perpetually offended by just about everything. Why? Because liberals have decided that being offended trumps logic, fact and every other argument that anyone can make. If it were up to liberals, we would not have free speech because too many people say things that contradict liberal ideas. So, they may not be able to put you in jail for believing that you can’t change genders or that it’s not smart to send gay men who may be sexually interested in teenagers out into the woods with them overnight as scout masters, but they can use a variety of different tactics to silence you. Outrage is one of those tactics because again, according to liberals, the second someone is outraged, the debate is over and they’ve won (Of course that only applies to liberals. If conservatives are offended by something, that doesn’t count.)

Of course, liberals love to use whatever they’re outraged about today as an excuse for government action or to gin up their base, but at the most fundamental level, liberal outrage is all about shutting up everyone who doesn’t agree with liberals. That’s the ultimate form of censorship. When you’re so scared that you might offend a liberal that you censor yourself. When you don’t wear the prom dress you want to wear. When you don’t make the joke. You don’t say anything that might make a liberal angry because you don’t want to deal with formal charges or 5,000 outraged liberals on Twitter that feel justified in calling you the worst names you’ve ever heard of because their widdle feelings are hurt. You can give in to their bullying if you like, but down that road lies a new liberal vision of totalitarianism where the bad guys win not because they deserve to or because they have guns pointed at your head, but because people are too afraid to speak the truth. For your sake, for the sake of your kids and for the sake of your country, don’t let liberal outrage determine what you can and cannot say.

Go here to read his examples.

2018? "Find something you care about, something which involves an act of creation. Let this creation lead you to opportunity!"

Joel D. Hirst writes,

America’s 2017? Four trillion in new wealth, unemployment at 4.7% is the lowest in 17 years, consumer confidence highest in a long time. A return of the rule of law after eight years of lawlessness; tax cuts that make even the EU tremble. Our supermarkets are full; our universities are the best in the world; we live long and prosperous lives full of choices and opportunities. Elysium in a world of want and suffering; something we were sensitive to in the age of our grandparents, prosperity and sacred values which we used as a platform for great acts of kindness product not of our moralizing vanity but because we truly believed that ancient axiom “To those who much has been given, much is required.”

That is before the arrival of the “The Age of Outrage” stole our sight, our soul. Narcissism marauding as correctness; ‘stilted justice’ as compassion; unknowing as wisdom.

“Age of Outrage”, or maybe I should call it the “Age of Misery”. And why? Why do we choose to be angry? Everybody is miserable all the time nowadays – and it doesn’t make any sense; measured against any standard you wish to choose, anywhere in the history of histories, America is a land of tremendous opportunity and incredible bounty and almost unlimited personal freedom; even more so in 2017.

I am genuinely baffled.

In his viral podcast Joe Rogan says “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”

Its so much about this, isn’t it? Gratitude, discipline in the small things, love of community and family and the reverence of gentleness and of those things which we know to be right and true and good. So, lest our “Age of Outrage”, our “Age of Misery” extend and we transform our planned paradise into a raging inferno through our bitterness, our wickedness – let me make a humble suggestion on this my last entry of 2017: Whatever your political leanings, I urge you, nay implore you to forget about the White House, forget about the Governor’s Mansion, forget even about the town council and the special election for the dogcatcher you are certain will herald national calamity. Find something you care about, something which involves an act of creation. Let this creation lead you to opportunity, for yourself and for others, and invest in that as down the rolling road of wonder you travel. Be positive, put down the IPhone upon which you are typing that spiteful Tweet to hurl against an unknown enemy, and lift your head. That first person you see…? Say something nice to them. Walk next door to your neighbor’s house and take a cookie platter or a box of chocolates; each time you find yourself filled with rage, make a kind decision. To those with whom you find yourself communing, devote yourself to constructive intercourse that uplifts and builds. And finally, do so locally in your communities and the places where you naturally rest your ideas of home. If you do this, you might end up turning the corner on your miserable 2017; and we might even discover again the bounty which we have so often used to help our hurting and suffering world.

Read more here.

Intense illiberalism

Jonathan Haidt writes in City Journal about some possible explanations why we Americans hate and fear each other so much in 2017. I excerpted the areas I think Haidt knows most about.

External enemies: Fighting and winning two world wars, followed by the Cold War, had an enormous unifying effect. The Vietnam War was different, but in general, war is the strongest known centripetal force. Since 1989, we have had no unifying common enemy.

The media: Newspapers in the early days of the republic were partisan and often quite nasty. But with the advent of television in the mid-twentieth century, America experienced something unusual: the media was a gigantic centripetal force. Americans got much of their news from three television networks, which were regulated and required to show political balance. That couldn’t last, and it began to change in the 1980s with the advent of cable TV and narrowcasting, followed by the Internet in the 1990s, and social media in the 2000s. Now we are drowning in outrage stories, very high-quality outrage stories, often supported by horrifying video clips. Social media is turning out to be a gigantic centrifugal force.

Diversity: The political scientist Robert Putnam found this in a paper titled “E Pluribus Unum,” in which he followed his data to a conclusion he clearly did not relish: “In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

Intersectionality: ...But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile. Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don’t have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.

And here’s the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

This means that on any campus where intersectionality thrives, conflict will be eternal, because no campus can eliminate all offense, all microaggressions, and all misunderstandings. This is why the use of shout-downs, intimidation, and even violence in response to words and ideas is most common at our most progressive universities, in the most progressive regions of the country. It’s schools such as Yale, Brown, and Middlebury in New England, and U.C. Berkeley, Evergreen, and Reed on the West Coast. Are those the places where oppression is worst, or are they the places where this new way of thinking is most widespread?

Let me remind you of the educational vision of the Founders, by way of E.D. Hirsch: “The American experiment . . . is a thoroughly artificial device designed to counterbalance the natural impulses of group suspicions and hatreds . . . This vast, artificial, trans-tribal construct is what our Founders aimed to achieve.” Intersectionality aims for the exact opposite: an inflaming of tribal suspicions and hatreds, in order to stimulate anger and activism in students, in order to recruit them as fighters for the political mission of the professor. The identity politics taught on campus today is entirely different from that of Martin Luther King. It rejects America and American values. It does not speak of forgiveness or reconciliation. It is a massive centrifugal force, which is now seeping down into high schools, especially progressive private schools.

Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation. But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens—power—and told to apply it to all situations. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.

Let us return to Jefferson’s vision: “For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it.” If Jefferson were to return today and tour our nation’s top universities, he would be shocked at the culture of fear, the prevalence of unchallenged error, and the shackles placed on reason.

Read more here.